Alderwood Townhomes took Kappes Miller Management to Small Claims Court in Shoreline, WA (Case no. 116-0221) and won on March 2nd, 2011 regarding being overcharged the Monthly Management fee for the past several years.
We tried everything to get this resolved peacefully with Kappes Miller since August 9th, but due to lack of response, and threats of them auditing our accounts and going after us for more money if we pursued the matter further, as well as wanting to charge us an additional B/O tax in addition to our annual adjustment amount (that is not written into our contract or documented anywhere), we were forced to pursue this further.
Mark Holmes (CEO) is the only person at Kappes Miller who an Association can work with if they find billing issues. His lack of response is the last straw that prompted us to terminate our agreement. Mark made several promises in the last 5 months to have this issue corrected, most of which we can only determine were delay tactics because he only followed up with relevent information twice in this timeperiod -- once within our 30day complaint period and again shortly after we filed the Small Court case mid-January.
We filed a case with the BBB in October, which Mark finally responded to in December and tried to bewiddle the claim with attempted libel against the board president for filing a false claim, for making up events and for lying about the situation, but never responded to it with any facts to back anything up, nor did he respond to the basis of why certain increases above the Business Index took place for the past 3 years.
At one point in trying to peacefully resolve this matter, on 10/20/2010 he told us in email: ""Please. I will have to start ignoring your e-mails if you keep this up. If you don't like the final result when this is all sorted out, you can hire an attorney.""
Our audit showed that Kappes was not calculating the annual adjustment correctly from the Business Index, which resulted in chronic overcharging each month -- we could not stop KMM from withdrawing funds (in excess of our approved Annual Budget) from our account and so were pretty much held hostage during the remainder of the contract -- because of this, we had an NSF charge in November for our Operations account.
With the information we provided Mark, it would have taken him no more than 10min to validate this matter -- the judge was able to confirm the evidence with similar material in about 2minutes.
For a complex of 25 units (we have been with KMM since 1997), KMM was charging us a base rate of $1,200/mo, then another $185 on average for fee's... Our approved budget for 2010 was for $994.84/mo and $108.33/mo for fee's.
If anyone has questions on our experiences, feel free to reach out and we can provide all the documentation.
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